


Rhetoric

by carpfish



Category: K (Anime)
Genre: Gen, Headcanon, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-13
Updated: 2013-03-21
Packaged: 2017-11-29 04:55:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/683024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carpfish/pseuds/carpfish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The question is rhetorical, the answer is tragic. A collection of headcanons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> word count: 373
> 
> warning(s): mentions of character death. headcanon

reishi does not believe in heroics. as a child with choppy blue hair cut by his mother’s scissors and glasses with too-large frames that hung crookedly off his face, he watched his father come back home at odd hours of the night. upon his return at night, the man clad in the blue uniform, wearing the shiny badge on his chest never seemed as proud or as noble as he did when setting out for work in the mornings, his gloves never as pure and white as they used to be. “daddy is a policeman,” his mother would tell him with a smile. “and as a policeman, it’s his job to do the right thing, no matter how hard it is.”

reishi knows that the greatest people never have their praises sung, nor are they ever as noble and shiny as one would expect. doing the right thing never garners any favor, and the most noble human that reishi ever knew was not a king or a hero, but merely a man who passed away from a heart attack while on patrol. it was not an illustrious or glorious death; the man was 77 and long due for retirement. good men don’t always go out with a bang.

many years later when reishi wears a blue uniform, shiny badge, and white gloves of his own, he decides that he will not be a hero. he will merely dispense justice and order where it is needed, all else be damned. as the blue king, it’s simply his job to do the right thing no matter how hard it is. he tries his best to help those he loves, he really does, but in the end, he often has to toss away personal sentiments in favor of what he’s always thought of as the greater good.

at the end of the day, reishi is as far from a hero as he can be, although he’s certain that he’s done nothing but what he’s thought to be right the entire way through. he knows doing the right thing never brings about happy endings. reishi’s cause is pure, so it doesn’t matter how many people hate him for the things he’s done (or how much he hates himself).


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> au in which anna grows up and becomes a scientist who studies the dresden slate and sword of damocles

It takes Anna a long time to understand her childhood. It’s said that retrospect provides clarity, but for her, it takes decidedly too long. Natural developments of the frontal cortex and vertical growth aren’t enough to make sense of the events that shaped her, and she fears that by the time her knowledge is sufficient, she will have forgotten the beauty of the color that she had once known so well. It is seared into her mind, deeper than any brand that could be placed on the skin, but with every fleeting second that piles on in hundreds and thousands like snowflakes in a blizzard, she knows that her memory is beginning to erode at the edges, becoming fuzzy and conjured at places where it used to be sharp and distinct. 

She encounters locked doors and broken hearts when she looks into the thoughts of others for answers, and it soon isn’t worth it anymore to sift through the countless jumbled images that she never wished to know or see. Often, they don’t know much more than she does, and she finds herself irked at their undying faith towards their king, before sorely regretting those thoughts and sending a silent apology to the skies. She only once tries procuring answers to her burning questions from the blue king, but all she finds is the memory of a very stoic boy standing before a grave in the snow who grows up to be a very stoic man who does the exact same thing many years later. She extracts herself from that realm to find tears rolling steadily down her cheeks, cold and mechanical like the jets of a fountain, and her chest aches with distinct familiarity. 

Books are a bigger help than any of the people around her, and she burns through them with determined fury. Philosophy in particular angers her while the classics fascinate her; however, it is ultimately the scientific writings that she consumes with the most fervor. She compartmentalises her world of colors and her world of monochromes into emotion and logic, and it’s in these divisions and discoveries that Anna learns to cheat time by growing faster than anyone could have expected.

These days, she spends most of her time sitting at streetside tables outside of chic french-styled cafes with her nose in a book and a warm thermos of tea beside her. The atmosphere is different, quieter, than the stench of smoke and alcohol that permeates a bar, but it’s comfortable nonetheless, and a change of scenery facilitates thinking, they say. As her eyes scan over the words of research reports that she’s read and reread hundreds of times penned in the neat handwriting of professor Adolf K. Weismann, her thoughts slide into place like the remnants of the Dresden Slate. Slowly, her memories begin to come into perspective, and she feels as though the ghost of Mikoto’s warmth is whispering over her shoulder, the collapsing ruins of an expired Sword, are just almost within reach.


End file.
